The Sense of Reckoning (17 page)

His father cleared his throat, as if the effort of getting Chip’s attention had taxed his voice. “Pritchard called. They’re putting on a party and need some extra hands. Seems a little late in the season for a party. Aren’t they usually gone by now?”

Chip put the trap on the workbench. “Yes. I guess with the weather being so hot and dry, there’s no reason for them to go to Florida just yet.”

His father tried to peer around him. “What kind of trap is that?”

“Nothing. I’m just experimenting.”

“Well, if you want to experiment, you could try experimenting on those lawn chairs when you get back—they’ll need sanding before we paint them. Don’t be too long, I need you here.”

Don’t be too long, I need you here
was a refrain so familiar that Chip barely registered it except as a kind of ache in his jaw. Now that Chip was seventeen, his father seemed torn between the competing desires to send him out on errands in the hotel pickup truck or to set him to work on hotel projects.

Retrieving the truck from behind the hotel, Chip wound his way off the Lynam’s Point peninsula and cut across what he thought of as the western part of the “lobster claw” that Mount Desert Island resembled on a map. He passed through Somesville and then crossed the eastern part of the “claw” on Eagle Lake Road. It was early October, and normally he would have been wearing a jacket, but the island was enjoying a glorious Indian summer, the cloudless sky a startling blue. Chip had woken to frost on the fields only a few weeks before, but then the temperature had climbed and the sun had beaten down on Mount Desert, baking the little remaining moisture out of the fields and forests. There hadn’t been a good rain since May.

Just outside Bar Harbor proper, Chip turned off Eagle Lake Road onto Cleftstone Road and then turned between two granite pillars joined by an arch of metalwork with “Jardin d’Eden” worked into its apex. This summer “cottage” had been built by James Furness Senior, who had started a lumber business and made the family fortune through some shrewdly negotiated government contracts during the First War. James Junior, who had rarely set foot in a lumber mill, had expanded that fortune further in the Second.
 

When James Junior and his wife, Josephine, had inherited Jardin d’Eden in the 1920s, they had set about making it the cultural mecca of Bar Harbor high society. They brought chamber orchestras up from New York for performances for their fellow society luminaries, decorated the rooms with museum-quality works of art, and hosted parties that were described with breathless excitement in the society columns of the Boston and New York newspapers.

At the end of each summer season, after the Furnesses had relocated to their winter home in Palm Beach, George Pritchard, Jardin d’Eden’s majordomo, hired a number of local boys and men to help with repairs and maintenance. For the last couple of years, after Lynam’s Point Hotel closed for the season, Chip’s father had sent him to work part-time at Jardin.

But this year, the Furnesses had extended their stay on Mount Desert and today the house was abuzz with preparation for that evening’s hastily arranged party. Gardeners carried baskets of flowers up from the greenhouses and gardens for which Jardin was famous. A delivery truck from Bar Harbor rattled by, headed to the kitchen entrance with crates of wine. A girl was setting up luminaria along the drive—no doubt an alternative to the usual tree-hung Japanese lanterns, dictated by the tinder-dry conditions. Beyond the veranda, Chip could catch a glimpse of the links at the Kebo Valley Golf Club and, beyond that, the town of Bar Harbor. In the other direction rose the thickly forested slopes of Great Hill.

Chip parked the truck behind the greenhouses with the other workers’ vehicles and went to find Pritchard.

He found him in the kitchen talking to Millie, one of the maids, who was polishing glassware with an old linen napkin.

“Check them all,” Pritchard was saying. “Last time, there was lipstick on one of the glasses and Mrs. Furness was none too pleased.”

“There’s no lipstick on a glass on my watch,” said Millie. “Must have been someone else in charge of the glassware for that party.”

“Well, let’s just make sure it doesn’t happen tonight,” said Pritchard.

“She just said it won’t,” said Chip.

Pritchard turned to Chip. “And what do you want, Lynam?”

George Pritchard was a local man made good. He had ingratiated himself with Mrs. Furness by towing her Packard out of a ditch after her chauffeur lost control on a slick patch of road. When Mrs. Furness heard his only slightly embellished story that he had served as a driver for high-ranking brass during the war, she immediately fired the chauffeur and replaced him with Pritchard, and since then Pritchard had risen quickly through the ranks of the Furness household. He had taken to his new high society life, and lost no opportunity to remind the locals of the importance of his position. They made fun of him behind his back, but each regretted that he had not been the one to have happened upon Mrs. Furness in the ditch.

“Dad told me you asked me to come by to help,” said Chip.

“Oh, right.”
 

Millie rolled her eyes at Pritchard’s back and gave Chip a friendly smile, then returned to polishing.

Pritchard gestured with the clipboard he was holding. “Come with me.” He left the kitchen and strode down the wide gallery that ran through the middle of the house toward the front door. “The Furnesses are having a party—last-minute thing, guest of honor just showed up yesterday. Ship from Italy, and train and car from New York. You’d think he could have given them a little more warning.”

“They’re having a party for a foreigner?”

“Well, it probably won’t be much of a party for him since he doesn’t speak much English, but he brought a painting that Mr. Furness bought. Mr. Furness is pretty pleased with it.” Pritchard looked at the clipboard. “Mrs. Furness wants fires laid in all the public rooms in case it gets chilly this evening.”

“Not likely to get chilly with this weather.”

“She says she wants fires and she’s the boss. Go on then.”

Chip turned toward the back of the house.

“And mind you make them so they’re not smoky!”

Chip waved an acknowledgement.

Chip had made up fires in the other first-floor rooms, with the last one to lay in the library. The door had been closed and Chip had postponed, thinking Mr. Furness must be in there and that he would wait until the room was empty, but then he had seen Mr. Furness outside talking to Pritchard. Perhaps the door had been closed accidentally. He knocked tentatively on the door and, getting no answer, opened it and entered with his basket of wood.

A young man—in fact, just about Chip’s age—stood at the window in an almost military stance, his arms held at his sides, his fingers curled. He had exotically dark hair and olive skin. A slight softening of his hard edges would have made him handsome, but his lean frame was a little too angular, his features a little too sharp.

Two wing chairs that were normally drawn up to the elaborately tiled fireplace had been moved in front of a large window framing a glorious view of Frenchman Bay. The chairs flanked a small table on which rested three champagne glasses. On the table, facing away from Chip, was a painting on an easel.

“Sì?”

“I just came to lay the fire.” Chip gestured to his basket.

“Sì.” The dark-haired boy clasped his hands behind his back. “Faccia pure.” He waved imperiously toward the fireplace.

Chip crossed to the fireplace, knelt, and began arranging the kindling.

After a moment, the boy said, “Aspetterò in veranda,” and walked stiffly to the door and disappeared into the hall.

Chip finished laying the fire and then crossed to the easel to see what was on it.

It was a painting of a young woman—dark hair loose around her shoulders, dark eyes meeting his. Her dress was plain but rich-looking, probably silk, puffed crimson sleeves slashed to release a spill of white fabric, the only decoration a pendant of gold, garnet, and pearls. Behind her, in muted colors but intricately wrought detail, was a landscape of rolling golden hills and columnar trees and, at the end of a winding road, a distant castle. Her expression was weary and vulnerable, hinting at a life that hadn’t lived up to the luxurious promise of the bucolic setting.

In a moment, Chip was transported back almost a dozen years, to the day he had seen his mother framed in the hotel kitchen window. The Maine pines had stood in for those manicured European trees, the hotel boathouse for the Mediterranean castle. Her dark hair had been down, her dark eyes turned toward him. And that look of almost-hidden sadness was the same.

Chip lowered himself onto one of the chairs and stared, entranced. He leaned forward, expecting the realism to fragment into dots of color, but even inches from the canvas, the painting held the same fidelity. He sank back into the chair.

In the years since his mother had disappeared, Chip had schooled himself not to think of her, since to do so was only a source of misery. He had quickly learned not to ask his father questions about her, and had eventually learned not to ask questions even of himself. The pain of her absence was like a finger snatched away, in a moment of inattention, by a spinning blade. The initial numb shock of seeing a hand so deformed was quickly overwhelmed by a bright shock of pain and then replaced by the dull throb that in the end resolved itself into the leaden acceptance of the loss. He had adjusted his expectations of what life could offer in the face of that loss.
 

But the lady in the painting was a balm to the pain. He almost felt as if he could reach out and take the delicate hand with the fine, slender fingers in his. The furrow in his brow smoothed, and his mouth relaxed into a smile.

Chip was not quite so lost in the painting that he missed the tread of light steps in the hallway. He leapt to his feet a moment before the door opened and Millie entered, a small tray tucked under her arm. She let out a little yelp when she saw him standing behind the easel.

“Chip Lynam, what are you doing in here?”

“Laying a fire.”

“And admiring the new painting, looks like.” She crossed the room and stood beside Chip, the sleeve of her black dress brushing his arm. “Pretty, ain’t it?”

He nodded. “Yes. She looks like …”

Millie looked at him expectantly. When he didn’t continue, she prompted, “Like what?”

Chip blushed. “Oh, I don’t know. Like a princess, I guess.”

Millie raised her eyebrows at Chip, then turned back to the painting. “The man who sold it to the Furnesses sent his son all the way from Italy to deliver it. Good-looking boy. That’s what the party’s for, to show it off.” She moved to the table and put the empty champagne glasses on her tray. “Seems like they’ve got enough paintings already, but I guess folk like that don’t think in terms of ‘enough.’’’

“They just got it?”

“Yup, showed up yesterday, the carpenter’s coming this afternoon to hang it.”

Chip felt what he could only describe as a twinge of jealousy. “They don’t need a carpenter, I could do that for them.”

Millie raised her eyebrows archly. “If you’re Mr. and Mrs. Furness and a nail needs driven, you’re sure to want the nail-driving expert to do it.”

“Who’s it by, do you know?”

Millie shook her head. “Some Italian artist. Now if you’re done mooning over it, you’d best push off before Mr. Pritchard finds you lollygagging.”

Chapter 22

Garrick and Ellen sat in the lounge, Ellen morosely paging through her notepad and Garrick sitting with his fingers interlaced, seemingly relaxed but in fact attentive to any sound from the veranda. He had maneuvered Ellen into the chair facing away from the window, which proved to be fortuitous when he saw Ann’s faint form crossing the lawn and then saw her captured in the sudden illumination of the boathouse light.

Ellen turned to look, but not before Ann disappeared behind the boathouse. “Wonder what that was,” she said.

“Rodent,” said Garrick.

“It would have to be a mighty big rodent to set off the motion detector,” said Ellen skeptically.

“Perhaps a raccoon,” he said gamely.

“Isn’t a raccoon a rodent?”

“No. It belongs to the Carnivora order.”

“Sounds like a kind of monk.”

Garrick raised his eyebrows.

Ellen tossed the pad to the floor. “He’s not coming tonight.”

“One never knows. We shouldn’t give up so easily.”

“Give up easily? We’ve been sitting here for almost an hour!”

“I’m well aware,” said Garrick testily.

Ellen stood and walked to the window. “Carnivora, eh?”

Garrick stood up. “Let’s put the kettle on.”

Ellen turned from the window. “I thought you wanted to wait for him?”

“Yes, but not here. Maybe he’s feeling we’re being too demanding. Spirits don’t like to feel constrained by human schedules,” he said, improvising. “We’ll have hot drinks and then come back and see if anything has changed.”

“I’ve got to stop drinking tea in the middle of the night,” she grumbled.

“Try hot water. It’s cleansing.”

Ellen snorted.